Software development has three distinct stages—Requirements Specification, Design and Construction. The deliverables at each of these stages are crucial to the quality of the final deliverable provided to the customer. Unfortunately, in many development situations, the skill set of the people working in each of these phases may vary significantly. This variation increases the risk of a loss of specification particulars and other problems at the point of handover from one stage to another. Additionally, with the advent of the global economy, these stages may be handled by personnel in different geographic zones who speak different languages and dialects. This distribution of software development stages across geographic and cultural lines may create problems in the interpretation of the requirements, the design, and the construction of the software product.
Because of these potential problems, review management has become a major task in software development and delivery. Indeed, the quality of the final application depends in great part on the review mechanisms followed. Conventional review management consists in part of a set of standard document templates that directs personnel to manually conduct the review at pre-defined project milestones.
There are, however, problems associated with conventional review management. The review itself is normally guided by review checklists, but many times such checklists are not followed by the persons involved nor enforced by management. Additionally, the checklist itself is not standardized, leading to discretion among the reviewers for such things as exactly what should be delivered at what stage of the process. The conventional review management process therefore varies depending in part on the persons involved in the review process. Additional problems can arise when the reviewer and the project deliverables are not physically present at the place of the review.
In the past, the review process for a Requirements Specification has concentrated on the presentation and the functional content of the requirements. This has lead to situations where a reviewed Requirement Specification that is found functionally correct will lead to an incorrect design owing to various deficiencies that are more relevant to system design (that is, more relevant than the presentation and functional content of the Requirements Specification are to system design). And an incomplete Requirement Specification often goes unnoticed or untraceable until the system is delivered and implemented by the end user. Detecting insufficiencies of the requirements at this stage is very costly both in terms of elapsed time and project cost.
Similarly, the planning and effective execution of software projects may be hindered due to non-standard representation of work products and work break down structures (WBS). That is, different project teams may follow a different granularity for the definition of the work product, and further may follow different work break down structures in tune with the granularity differences of the work product. This may lead to confusion when reporting progress since not all groups follow common methods, and there is no linkage between the work products and their progression in the different stages of the software development. Consequently, project managers do not have a clear view on the progress of the project due to non-correlation of the planning parameters and the release parameters.
It is therefore desirable to collect metrics regarding the development and review of software projects. Unfortunately, all too often the metrics collection process happens as a separate activity, in a non-formalized and non-structured fashion, at the end of the project, and is not available for mid course corrections during project execution. There is also not a clear method for identifying points at which defects may be introduced.